Aristophanes Birds 227

ed. F. W. Hall, ed. William M. Geldart

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Birds. Aristophanes. ed. F. W. Hall, ed. William M. Geldart. Oxford. 1906.

Sponsored by Perseus Project, Tufts University.

Funding provided by The Annenberg CPB/Project.

Current edition Perseus

Ὄρνιθες (Greek) (Aristophanes. Aristophanis Comoediae, Vol. 1. Hall, F. W. and Geldart, William M., editors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906.)

Translations (3)
Birds Perseus (Aristophanes. The Complete Greek Drama, Vol. 2. Anonymous, translator. O'Neill, Eugene; Oates, Whitney Jennings, editors. New York: Random House, 1938 (printing).)

No corresponding passage available

Birds (OCR draft) Experimental (Anonymous translation, 1938 compilation; legacy Perseus source migration. Preserved separately from the revised canonical perseus-eng2 at the project owner's request.) — 227 focus
English (Sanjaya, generated; selected passages) (OCR draft) Experimental (Source: pnadelofficial/aristophanes-sanjaya, commit c319590c139e5603e71f0699caa0663d823af8ad. Machine-generated source annotations retained; see Sanjaya import audit for coverage and limitations.) — 227 focus

Commentary

Commentary (Sanjaya, generated; selected passages) (OCR draft) (Source: pnadelofficial/aristophanes-sanjaya, commit c319590c139e5603e71f0699caa0663d823af8ad. Machine-generated source annotations retained; see Sanjaya import audit for coverage and limitations.) focus

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Line 240

τά τε κατʼ ὄρεα τά τε κοτινοτράγα τά τε κομαροφάγα,
The compound adjective κοτινοτράγᾱ (kotlinotragai) is a striking example of Aristophanic comic neologism, literally 'cotton-goat-eaters' or 'cotton-stump-eaters.' The noun κοτῖνος (kotinos) refers to the cotton-plant (Gossypium), which was not native to Greece and was likely unknown to the Athenian audience in the 5th century BCE, or at least not as a cultivated food source. The compound suggests a fantastical, hyperbolic geography of the birds' realm, where they consume exotic flora alongside the local 'comarophagoi' (moss-eaters). This lexical construction relies on the audience's ignorance of actual botany to create a sense of the bizarre and the far-off, a common technique in the parabasis and the description of Cloudcuckooland.

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Line 256

καινὸς γνώμην
The phrase καινὸς γνώμην presents a significant syntactic anomaly. While γνώμη is typically abstract (meaning 'opinion', 'judgment', or 'policy') and governs the genitive, here it is modified by the nominative masculine adjective καινός. This construction relies on the rare elliptical understanding of a masculine substantive like ἄνθρωπος or ἄρχων (implying 'a man of new counsel' or 'a new advisor'), a metonymy characteristic of Aristophanic comedy where abstract nouns are treated as concrete agents of policy. The lack of a clear antecedent in the immediate context forces the reader to reconstruct the implied subject from the dramatic situation, where the chorus is proposing a radical new political order.